The New Libraries

My wife now works in the Lykes Co Library. She likes it partly, I think, because it is so educational. This snippet of an article by Thomas Washington from The Washington Post therefore struck a chord:

I became a school librarian because I loved books and wanted to bring
the joy of reading to young people... Silly me. Young people no longer read for pleasure, and libraries are no longer places to discover great works of literature and biography and history. We librarians now exist soley to help bored students maximize their database searches, so they can complete papers and assignments in minimal time. When students do check out a book on, say, Jane Austen or Thomas Jefferson, they don't actually read it; they check it back in the next day, having copied down what they need to cite the book as a "source."

Camen has a young colleague at the library who is taking a course at the
Lykes Community College and had a paper to write for one of her classes.
She was going through a web site rapidly cutting and pasting paragraphs.
When Carmen ask her is she was able to read the blocks she was cutting at that
speed the young woman said no, but that was all that was needed to complete the
paper.